This book explores the intersections of film, justice, and the state in comparative perspective across a range of major Asian countries, including India, China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam. The contributing authors cross the conventional border between the analysis of on-screen and off-screen intersections of law and cinema.

This book explores the intersections of film, justice, and the state in comparative perspective across a range of major Asian countries, including India, China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam. The contributing authors cross the conventional border between the analysis of on-screen and off-screen intersections of law and cinema.

This study examines the interdependent relationships between the film industry and the state in East Asia, treating films as political economic products, mixtures of government policy and industrial motives, rather than mere works of art or media commodities . Through studies of national film policies, film industry strategies and cultural-political influences on audience receptivity, this book reveals how films are formed by the interaction of the state, the film companies and audiences.

Film censorship has always been a controversial matter, particularly in jurisdictions with restrictive state-based censorship systems. This book reviews the film censorship system in the Asia-Pacific by comparing the systems used in Malaysia, Hong Kong and Australia. It identifies the key issues and concerns that arise from the design and implementation of the system by examining the censorship laws, policies, guidelines and processes. The book evaluates film practitioners' and censors' opinion of, and experience in, dealing with those issues, and goes on to develop reform proposals for the film censorship system.

This book brings together nine original chapters to examine genre agency in East Asian cinema within the transnational context. It addresses several urgent and pertinent issues such as the distribution and exhibition practices of East Asian genre films, intra-regional creative flow of screen culture, and genre’s creative response to censorship. The volume expands the scholarly discussion of the rich heritage and fast-changing landscape of filmmaking in East Asian cinemas. Confronting the complex interaction between genres, filmic narrative and aesthetics, film history and politics, and cross-cultural translation, this book not only reevaluates genre’s role in film production, distribution, and consumption, but also tackles several under-explored areas in film studies and transnational cinema, such as the history of East Asian commercial cinema, the East Asian film industry, and cross-media and cross-market film dissemination.

This ground-breaking book explores the moral dimensions of sexual imagery in contemporary, general-release Asian films. It examines debates that arise over aesthetic styles and the cultural and traditional influences that determine the content and impact of these films. The social and regulatory environments for filmmakers across Asia reflect distinct national and cultural differences. In just the past decade, for instance, Indian cinema has rapidly moved from representations of coy and submissive female protagonists to highly eroticized leading ladies unafraid of flaunting their sexuality. On the other hand, the cinema emerging from the Chinese mainland has been much more circumspect in its representations of overt sexuality, at times in conflict with other Chinese cinemas from Hong Kong and Taiwan. This use of sexual imagery or morally questionable film content raises on-going debates into censorship and the use of state or industry controls to protect certain sectors of society from exposure to particular narratives or images. Film, like all forms of art, fulfils a number of aesthetic functions for local, regional and international audiences. As distribution and technological advances make Asian films more readily available across the globe, an understanding of the different aesthetics at play will enable readers of this book to recognize key cultural motifs in representations of onscreen sexuality and the surrounding controversies found in cinematic texts from Asia.

This prescient Research Agenda explores how comparative law has developed significantly in this century, offering insights into different perspectives on its scope, methods and outlook. It addresses the similarities and differences between legal systems and traditions, expressing why pluralistic methodology strengthens comparative law as a discipline.